We are all familiar with the 30-minute city. But the average attention span has collapsed to 47 seconds – barely enough time to notice a building, let alone a neighbourhood. What does that mean for placemaking?
I am not a placemaker. But I have spent my career thinking about how to make places better. And I know that it is the small human-scale quirks that make Australian cities unique: the squeak of a Melbourne tram, the functional folk art of Adelaide’s suburban Stobie poles, Canberra’s iconic bus shelters sprouting like Brutalist mushrooms.
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We are entering an era where buildings will be generated, not designed. Where precincts w…
We are all familiar with the 30-minute city. But the average attention span has collapsed to 47 seconds – barely enough time to notice a building, let alone a neighbourhood. What does that mean for placemaking?
I am not a placemaker. But I have spent my career thinking about how to make places better. And I know that it is the small human-scale quirks that make Australian cities unique: the squeak of a Melbourne tram, the functional folk art of Adelaide’s suburban Stobie poles, Canberra’s iconic bus shelters sprouting like Brutalist mushrooms.
Spinifex is an opinion column. If you would like to contribute, contact us to ask for a detailed brief.
We are entering an era where buildings will be generated, not designed. Where precincts will be master planned by machine. Algorithms optimise for efficiency. But they can’t hear the clink of café spoons or smell bluestone paving on a rainy day.
Will an algorithm ever understand the ingenuity of a suburban book library made from an old fridge? Or appreciate the nostalgic joy of a painted tyre swan planter in a neighbour’s yard? Or the pleasure of reading the weather-worn nameplates above the front doors of a line of terrace houses?
These features aren’t “strategic activations”. They are artefacts. Placemakers must protect the analogue, the awkward, the idiosyncratic – and still capture people’s attention in an era of attention collapse.
Addicted to elsewhere
The average Australian adult spends six hours a day online – two of those on social media. “Brain-rot” was the Oxford Word of the Year in 2024 for good reason.
Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, has tracked the interplay between digital and offline behaviour for two decades. She found the average attention span has fallen from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds today.
Notifications, alerts and infinite scrolls are engineered to hijack our attention and create dependency loops. As Anna Lembke says in Dopamine Nation: we’ve become addicts.
The consequences aren’t just shrinking attention spans: empathy, social cohesion and mental health are also casualties. Even our ability to make eye contact is diminishing.
What does this mean for placemaking? What does this mean for our ability to notice what’s going on around us, or to even care?
A slow reveal
One of my favourite places in the world is perhaps a quirky choice: Dairy Road in Canberra. Once a forgotten road on the fringe of Fyshwick – all warehouses and wrong turns to the airport – it is now a living placemaking experiment.
Since 2018, Molonglo Group has been shaping the site not with a masterplan, but with curiosity.
Two unremarkable industrial buildings from the 1970s have become artists’ and makers’ studios. Hospitality and retail bump up against light industry. There’s a chocolate factory next to coworking next to a café; a barbershop beside bouldering and brewing.
An intentionally ambiguous structure – Less by Pezo von Ellrichshausen – features 36 concrete columns and a circular ramp, a shallow stream and thousands of native plants. “Usage undefined” is how Molonglo Group describes it.
What I love about Dairy Road is simple. It can’t be experienced in 47 seconds. It is revealed slowly – with a sense of rhythm that can’t be rushed. Being there, you can’t help but pay attention.
Stories in steel and eels
Now to another place – taller and faster-paced yet still inviting us to look again. Parramatta Square is one of Australia’s most ambitious urban redevelopments: four commercial towers, 240,000 square metres of office and retail space, 10,000 square metres of public domain and a roll call of major tenants.
6-8 Parramatta Square
Every tower boasts top NABERS and Green Star ratings. In 2024, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named 6&8 Parramatta Square the best tall building in its class.
In between the towers, there’s PHIVE – Parramatta’s new award-winning library and council chambers. It is impossible to ignore PHIVE’s low-rise red roof, inspired by the local grevilleas, a splash of colour as startling as a blood red poppy.
And then there’s the precinct’s art. Parramatta takes its name from the Dharug word Barramattagal – the place where the eels lie down. Reko Rennie’s sculpture of the same name captures this in two pink and silver forms that rise and cross in play.
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Place of the Eels is a mirror-polished, eight-metre-tall Leyland bus, standing upright in the square. A tribute to the Parramatta Eels’ glory days and to the legendary Jack Gibson, who bought a second-hand bus to coach his team after Cumberland stadium was torched during an out-of-control party celebrating the team’s 1981 premiership victory. It’s playful. It’s absurd. It’s entirely local.
These stories tell a simple truth: a good place doesn’t dazzle all at once. It unfolds slowly.
The radical act of noticing
Placemakers love the word intentional. And yes, placemaking does need to be deliberate, strategic and purposeful. But my colleagues at DJAS Architecture talk less about intention and more about attention – about tuning into the particularities of place, and the choreography of light, colour and humanity.
The guiding word we need now is mindful. Mindfulness is an antidote to distraction and mindfulness in placemaking means designing for the small details – not just the “wow” moments, but the quiet encounters. The moments that stretch, rather than splinter, our attention spans and add dimension to the human experience.
The next frontier in placemaking isn’t a new digital tool, policy framework or a community engagement checklist. It’s much simpler – and older.
It’s noticing. Noticing what makes a place sing. Noticing who and what is missing from the map. Noticing what patterns are worth preserving.
We are seeing attention fracture; social cohesion dissolve and empathy erode. The placemaker’s superpower isn’t activation. It’s the ability to help people notice again.
This is urgent work: to see what is unique – and uniquely human – in a place. To help humans see anew. And to help humans feel profoundly seen.
Catherine Carter, DJAS Architecture
Catherine Carter is a respected leader in the property industry, known for her contributions to urban design, innovation and community building. She is the CEO of DJAS Architecture, Founder and Director of think-tank Salon Canberra and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. More by Catherine Carter, DJAS Architecture